Endocrine Abstracts

Testosterone is the main male hormone controlling sexual and reproductive functions. Testosterone deficiency is associated with male hypogonadism, a syndromic condition that encompasses the well-recognised sexual and reproductive failure. Male hypogonadism has been, in fact, recently associated to an increased cardiovascular and metabolic risk (metabolic syndrome), most probably because testosterone deficiency is a stigmata of visceral adiposity. A stepwise reduction in testos...

Sexual reproduction is still an evolutionary puzzle. A female “throws away” half of her genes during meiosis, and fills up what she lost with genes from a male. To compensate for this two-fold cost of efficiency selective mate choice has to achieve at least a two-fold genetic benefit in each generation so that sexual reproduction is not lost.Sexual selection has been proposed as one mechanism to explain the maintenance of high allelic diver...

Over the 5 years, the field of bile acid (BA) research has undergone a considerable evolution. Besides their well-established roles in dietary lipid absorption and cholesterol homeostasis, it has recently become clear that BAs are also biological signaling molecules. For instance, BAs were shown to be natural ligands that activate FXR, which controls both the synthesis and enterohepatic recycling of BAs. We have shown that the FXR-mediated SHP induction attenuates the capacity...

The importance of thyroid hormones in neurological development has been well documented in both animals and humans. Thyroid hormones deficit during fetal development can have irreversible adverse effects on an individual’s neurological function; including mental retardation, deafness, and spasticity. The only source of thyroid hormones for the developing brain in early pregnancy is from the mother. There is a growing body of epidemiological and experimental evidence to su...

Human autoimmune thyroid diseases (AITD), mainly including Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (HT) and Graves’ disease (GD), are characterized by reactivity to self-thyroid antigens. Regulatory T cells have an important role in immune tolerance to self-antigens. We have reported that different regulatory T cell subsets are abundant in the peripheral blood and in inflamed thyroid tissue in AITD and are able to synthesize the immunoregulatory cytokines IL-10 and TGF-beta. However...

In the late 1700s, a 22 y patient suffering from pituitary gigantism died and his skeleton was deposited in a medical museum. A contemporary etching showed him standing alongside a set of giant twin brothers who were believed to be his cousins. The existence of such a rare disorder within closely related family members indicates to modern science a genetic dimension to their disease. In 1909 Cushing opened the skull and he found a greatly enlarged pituitary fossa. We identifie...

The inhibition of aldosterone activity is a significant approach for preventing the progression of cardiovascular diseases in hypertensive patients. We hypothesized that N-type calcium channels might regulate aldosterone biosynthesis and firstly examined in vivo studies using rats. We investigated the effects of cilnidipine, an L-/N-type calcium channel blocker (CCB), and nifedipine, an L-type CCB, on aldosterone levels and found that only cilinidipine significantly red...

The incidence of type 1 diabetes (T1D) has increased markedly after World War II among children and adolescents, and in parallel the mean age at diagnosis has decreased. These trends support a critical role of exogenous factors in the development of T1D, since genetic factors alone can hardly explain the rapid increase. The hygiene hypothesis postulating a relationship between allergic diseases and a childhood environment characterized by a decreased pathogen exposure has rece...

Sclerostin is an osteocyte-expressed, extracellular cystine-knot protein that is lacking in patients with sclerosteosis, a rare condition characterized by excessive bone formation. Sclerosteosis patients exhibit very high bone mass (lumbar spine Z scores up to +14) and are anecdotally resistant to bone fracture. Homozygous patients commonly develop symptoms associated with cranial nerve entrapment from excessive bone formation but do not show signs of heterotopic bone formatio...

Sports drug testing laboratories are facing multifaceted challenges including the misuse of naturally/endogenously occurring substances, non-approved/discontinued drug candidates, urine manipulation, etc. In order to enable the differentiation of licit drug use and/or the natural variation of hormone concentrations (due to e.g. legal interventions) from doping offences, best-possible analytical performance is required. Therefore, modern doping control analytical assays commonl...